Gravity | Maura O’Connor

Today I am fragile
pale
twitching
insane and full of purpose.

I’m thinking of my lover:
my soft hips pressing his coarse belly,
my tongue on a salmon nipple,
his hand buried in my thick orange hair
the telephone ringing.

I’m thinking we tend our illnesses
as if they are our children:
fevered
screaming
demanding attention and twenty dollar bills,
hours we could have spent making love with the television on.

Faith is a series of calculations
made by an idiot savant.
I’m in love.
I’m alone
in this city of painted boxes
stacked like alphabet blocks
spelling nothing.

There are things I know:
trees don’t sing
birds don’t sprout leaves
roses bloom because that’s what roses do,
whether we write poems for them
or not.

I concentrate on small things:
ivy threaded through chain link,
giveaway kittens huddled in a soggy cardboard box,
a fat man blowing a harmonica
through a beard of rusty wires
brown birds chattering furiously on power lines.

I try not to think about
lung cancer, AIDS,
the chemicals in the rain;
things I can’t imagine any more than
a color I’ve never seen.

My heart is graffiti on the side of a subway train,
a shadow on the wall made by a child.
Nothing has been fair since my first skinned knee

I believe death
must be.

I cling to love as if it were an answer.
I go on buying eggs and bread,
boots and corsets,
knowing I’ll burn out before the sun.

I’m thinking of
the days I tried to stay awake
while the billboards and TV ads
for condoms, microwave brownies, and dietetic jello
lulled me to sleep.

A brown-eyed girl once told me a secret
that should have blown this city
into a mass of unconnected atoms
Our sewage is piped to the sea.
Beggars in the street
are hated for having the nerve
to die in public.

Charity requires paperwork,
Relief requires medication

as if we were the afterthoughts of institutions
greater than our rage.

Gravity chains us to the asphalt with such grace
we think it is kind.

We all go on buying lottery tickets
Diet Coke and toothpaste
as if the sky over our heads
were the roof of a gilded cage.

We provide evidence that we were here:

initials cut into cracked vinyl bus seats,
into trees growing from squares
of concrete,
a name left on a stone, an office building,
a flower, a disease, a museum,
a child.
Tonight the stars glitter like rhinestones
on a black suede glove.

In the coffin my room has become,
I talk to God
about the infrequency of rain
about people who can’t see the current gentleness
running under the pale crust of my skin.

I tell him under
the jackhammer crack, the diesel truck rumble,
even the clicking sound traffic lights make
switching from yellow to red,
there is a silence
swallowing
every song,
conversation,
every whisper made beside graves
or in the twisted white sheets of love.

I tell him I can’t fill it
with dark wine, blue pills,
a pink candle lit at the altar
the lover
touching my hair.
God doesn’t answer.
God doesn’t know our names.

He’s only the architect
designing the places we occupy
like high rise offices or ant hills

I know this
the way I know
sunrise and sunset
are caused by the endless turning
of the Earth.

“Treat others the way that you would like to be treated.” You’ve heard it all your life. From the time you were old enough to understand, your parents advised you of the golden rule. Today, I’m asking you to forget it. It’s terrible advice! Treating others the way that you want to be treated was probably responsible for every failed relationship that you’ve ever had.

Here is the problem: NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO BE TREATED THE WAY THAT YOU WANT TO BE TREATED.

I hope that you just had a light bulb moment. When I realized this, I know I sure did. I realized it for the first time during a training seminar. It was a course for first-time supervisors. We were talking about what drives people toward success or what “motivates” people to be their best selves, to perform optimally. The instructor gave us a quiz that we could share with our employees. It asks them to rate potential motivators from least to most important using a scale from 1 – 10, 1 being the most important and 10 being the least important. The motivators included things like money, freedom, creativity, public recognition, and so on. The thought behind the test being that every person is motivated by something different. For one person, the way to get them to perform might be regular salary increases. Other people don’t care as much about compensation as they do about public recognition or the ability to be creative.

I thought about this for a minute and then it really clicked. I had been attempting to motivate my employees with motivators that motivated me. It stretched far beyond that, too. For my entire life, I had been treating people the way that I wanted to be treated. I never stopped to consider that perhaps this person does not want what I want. Perhaps he or she wants what he or she wants. I realized that the golden rule is a sham.

It wasn’t long before I began to take my new perspective and apply it to all of my relationships. Rather than treating my mother the way that she wanted to be treated, I had been treating her the way that I wanted to be treated. Rather than treating my friends the way that they wanted to be treated, I had been treating them the way that I wanted to be treated. And perhaps, most importantly, rather than treating my partner the way that he wanted to be treated, I had been treating him the way that I wanted to be treated. I say that this is most important because it had the most dire consequences. And I’m certain that if you think about it, you will relate.

Romantic relationships, while often the most rewarding, can also be the most difficult to manage. One of the biggest reasons why divorce is so common is because people do not get this simple idea. We must take the time and effort to learn how our partners want to be treated. To illustrate why this is so important, let me share an example from my own life.

Matthew and I have a lot in common. That is why we have been together for five years and why we are getting married in June. However, we are also different in many ways. Perhaps the thing that makes us most different is the way that we handle conflict. I am a talker, a thinker, and a cuddler. When I am angry or hurt or sad, I want Matthew to be there for me in every way. I want to talk things out. I want to be held. I want sympathy. We have come to the conclusion that I am almost like a child in this sense. I long to be “babied.” Matthew, on the other hand, is the polar opposite. When conflict arises, he immediately longs for solitude. He shuts up and shuts down. He wants to be left alone.

Now imagine what happened for the first couple of years of our relationship when Matthew got angry and I started to treat him the way that I wanted to be treated (like a baby!). Not surprisingly it didn’t go over very well! We played this horrible dance for years.

It’s alright to treat people the way that you want to be treated, but only if that is the way that they want to be treated, too. In our case, when it came to conflict, each of us wanted to be treated in very different ways. It took awhile for us to figure this out; but when we did, the reward was tremendous. Like all couples, we still struggle through it. Sometimes, it’s difficult. For example, when conflict arises and I want to talk it out, I have to be extremely vigilant to make sure that I give Matthew the time and space that he needs. And likewise, when I am hurt, he has to be very aware to make sure that he gives me the attention and nurturing that I am seeking. These behaviors go against our natural inclinations because they are not the behaviors that we would seek for ourselves, but making the extra effort pays off big time.

This principle can be applied to any relationship–whether personal, professional, or whatever have you. I know that many people live by the golden rule. Maybe you don’t need to throw it out completely, but if you can make a small adjustment, it may just prove to enhance every relationship that you’ll ever have.

In love & light,
Dena

Sometimes life gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it. It can be hard to recognize. Life crashes in on us in frenzied waves. It feels like we’re drowning. But when we slow down, count our blessings, and breathe—often, we find that we are surrounded with everything that we need.

The past couple of years have been a roller coaster for me. In September 2010 I left my career in association management and hopped on a plane to Paris. I pursued my passion for motivational speaking. I traveled around the country for speaking engagements & had an amazing time. It was an incredible experience but I realized that motivational speaking is not for me—at least not full-time. I will continue to book “select” speaking engagements but I don’t want to make a career of it.

I also thought about going back to school to become a teacher. I have my Bachelor’s degree in English Writing and felt that teaching would be a great fit. I’m getting married in June and with each day that passes I become more of a homebody. I love our little home on our little mountain. Teaching would offer me a good schedule, close to home and I could focus on English language and literature—things that I am passionate about. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that jumping through the graduate school hoops and acquiring more debt less than a year before I get married/try to start a family, isn’t such a great idea.

For all of these reasons and a few others, I started job hunting about six months ago. I found out that the job market is as terrible as everybody says it is. I had a really hard time getting even a call back. Friends and family tried to help but nothing was panning out. I had a job but it wasn’t sustainable for the long-term and my finances were slipping deeper into the red every month.

Then one day I heard about an opening at an association not too far away. When I read the job description I was floored to find that it was so similar to what I’d been doing for the three years after graduating college that I was, indeed, the perfect candidate. I scored an interview and the rest was history. Tomorrow (by the time this is posted it will be today) is my first day at the new job.

Just when I started to feel scared and confused, the Universe opened a beautiful new door for me. There are so many wonderful things about this new opportunity. I will be getting to work with volunteers again which is something that I truly love to do and am very good at. It is a step up professionally (a mid-senior level position) and I will be making a nice salary which will allow me to pay down my student loan debt (within a year if I practice a frugal lifestyle!).

There is a small part of me that worries about going back into the Monday to Friday cubicle nation, but in the end, I know that this is exactly what I need at this stage in my life’s journey. I have learned so much about myself in the last two years that I do not run the risk of falling into the auto-pilot, corporate zombie lifestyle. Conscious, thoughtful living is a part of me now. I am so excited about this next chapter of my path! Wish me luck, friends.

xo,
Dena

The Abandoned Valley | Jack Gilbert

Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?

“One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am—a reluctant enthusiast, a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise… you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.” —Edward Abbey

Students at Fundaninas, an orphanage in Guatemala City, Guatemala. With support from The Rotary Foundation through several Matching Grants, the orphanage houses, nourishes, and educates girls ages 2-18. Rotary Images/ Monika Lozinska-Lee.

A note from Dena: This is a guest post from my good friend, Lou Mello. Lou is an active member of the Rotary Club. For a long time I’ve wanted to know more about this organization. I knew that it must be a great thing because Lou is an amazing guy & he is deeply involved. I asked Lou to write this for me & my Evolution You family. Enter Lou…

So, how to start a post about myself and Rotary and make it a little interesting for getting us all from Darkness to Light? First, I should let you know that I don’t much like talking about myself, please see this post on Andra Watkins blog for that. I try to live the Golden Rule and my experience in Rotary is the closest I can come to living that daily.

Rotary came into my life nearly 13 years ago and it’s all about the things we should care about. Rotary’s motto is “Service Above Self” and that is all about giving of your time and treasure to help others. We help folks in our own local communities as well as people around the world who need clean water, education, food and shelter and a multitude of things that Rotarians can provide by working together.

My local Rotary Club meets weekly for lunch and we have about 70 members. We have fellowship events, hold an annual Soccer Classic fundraiser and do a number of projects locally. Some of them are giving all third graders in our area dictionaries, we also provide free shoes for needy school children in our area as well as backpacks of food weekly for those students that may not get food at home on the weekend. We also provide 7 scholarships annually for high school students to attend colleges. Here is a link to our Rotary District Facebook site. Our Rotary District consists of 79 Clubs in South and Eastern South Carolina.

A little history of Rotary, founded in 1905 by Paul Harris in Chicago, he was looking for that small town network of friends that one could associate with. Paul and three others attended that first meeting and they rotated to one another’s offices and that begat the name “Rotary”. Rotary began spreading across the country in the U.S. and then internationally with the first Club outside of the U.S being in Winnipeg, Canada. There are now over 34,000 Clubs worldwide in over 200 countries consisting of 1.2 million Rotarians. See more details at this link.

Rotary supports programs for young people with Rotary Youth Exchange, Rotaract, RYLA and the Ambassadorial Scholar program. Youth Exchange sends high school age students abroad for a year at another high school and they stay with a Rotarian Host Family.

Rotaract is a Club for young folks between the ages of 18 and 30 and often associated with a university. They run their Club just like a regular Rotary Club with meetings, service projects, fellowship and just having fun. See more info on New Generations activities here.

The Ambassadorial Scholars program sends selected Scholars abroad for a year of study, service and voluntary project work with Host Rotary Clubs. They are usually just getting out of college and going abroad for some post graduate work. Moving forward, these Scholars will all be in one of the Six Areas of Focus of the Rotary Foundation. Namely, Peace and Conflict Prevention/Resolution, Disease Prevention and Treatment, Water and Sanitation, Maternal and Child Health, Basic Education and Literacy and Economic and Community Development. More on that when we look at the heart of Rotary, the Rotary Foundation. The Rotary Foundation has funded over 41,000 Ambassadorial Scholars since 1947.

The Rotary Foundation is the heart of Rotary and funds humanitarian programs all over the world, primarily in the Six Areas of Focus. The History of the Foundation can be found here. Our number one Rotary priority is to eradicate Polio from the face of the earth. This is our PolioPlus program and in place since 1985. When it started, there were 165 countries worldwide with endemic Polio. Now there are only four, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nigeria. We just celebrated an entire year without a single new case of Polio being reported in all of India, so we are nearly down to just three countries. There have been over 2 billion children immunized over the years and Rotarians have contributed nearly a Billion Dollars to fund this program. Bill Gates values Rotary’s role in this so much that he gave $355 million dollars to the PolioPlus fund. This will be only the 2nd disease ever wiped out on earth with smallpox being the first. Check out the Rotary PolioPlus Facebook site.

Get Involved
How does one get involved in Rotary? It is made up of business and professionals worldwide with a like mind to serve others, promote peace and understanding and do good in the world. Find a local Rotary Club and get involved, it will truly change your life. Here is a link to Rotary Basics, a quick introduction to Rotary.

We let our Rotary Four Way Test guide our lives, both professionally and personally. Of the things we think, say or do, we ask ourselves:

1. Is it the Truth?
2. Is it Fair to all concerned?
3. Will it build Goodwill and better friendships?
4. Will it be Beneficial to all concerned.

These twenty four little words, taken to heart, can change the world. Check out Rotary at www.Rotary.org for all the details.

A huge thank you to Lou Mello for sharing this guest post! I’ve learned a lot about the Rotary & I hope that you have, too. If you’re looking for a positive way to get involved and spread love & light—look no further.

xo,
Dena

Wait | Galway Kinnel

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Why do we—human beings—crave newness? What propels us toward bigger, better, faster, stronger? How did we end up in this time of unprecedented change, where the new information we handle daily has quadrupled in the past thirty years, with no sign of slowing?

In her book—NEW—behavioral science writer, Winifred Gallagher, sets out to answer these questions. Recently, my friends at TLC Book Tours asked me to review NEW and my ever-inquiring mind was delighted.

The book fell into my lap at just the right moment. The ideas of newness, change, and flexibility have been consuming me of late. We each have to make a decision. We can cling to what we know, rigidly and in fear. Or, we can practice flexibility and embrace change. NEW explores these ideas and explains why change is a critical part of our human selves. The entire first chapter is dedicated to exploring human evolution—from our earliest primitive ancestors to our nearest relatives—how did we get this way? Our scientific history shows that those who could adapt to change survived. Those who could not adapt perished.

Our unique human brains are biologically primed to engage with and create novelty, from our ancestors’ first bow and arrow to the latest tablet computer. Our “neophilia” (love of newness) has enabled us to thrive in a world of cataclysmic change, but today we confront an unprecedented deluge of new things—from products to information. To prevent our great strength from becoming a weakness in today’s fast-paced world, we must reconnect with neophilia’s grand evolutionary purpose: to help us learn, create, and adapt to new things that have real value and dismiss the rest as distractions.

So, how do we accomplish this great task? How do we continue to embrace change and avoid complete overwhelm? Gallagher says that the answer is two things—selectivity and balance. This advice speaks to me on a deep level. Selectivity & Balance—that we may be so careful in choosing how we invest our time, energy and emotion. (I’ve written in detail on this topic. See: Cut the Fat Transform Your Life.)

I enjoyed this book a great deal. I’ll be giving my copy away to one lovely reader. If you’re interested, leave a comment below. Be sure to include your email. I’ll select a winner at random next week. (US readers only. International shipping fees are bonkers!)

In love & light,
Dena